60 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com JANUARY 2016
ARCTIC pIloTAgesafely back home in Strangford Lough.significance is Hecla Havn, a lagoon The only charted anchorage of
protected by a shallow entrance that prevents the bigger bergs from drifting in. This provides perfect shelter from big ice but on my most recent visit in 2013
it gave no protection from another more persistent and threatening menace – mosquitoes. Never before have I been troubled in Greenland by these beasts,
but on this occasion they made up for it. They descended in clouds, fed lustily on any exposed flesh and followed us to the boat where they colonised the interior,
creating a nightmare that lasted for days.nights is Jyttes Havn in the Bjorn Oer An anchorage that warms my winter
group of islands. We arrived late at night as the sun was dipping behind the huge cathedral cliffs and rocky spires of the Stauning Alps on the nearby mainland.
When full light returned in the early hours it revealed a stunning panorama with the distant inland ice curled over the mountaintops like frosting on a Christmas
cake. And all around, an amazing array of wild flowers and mosses along with avens, saxifrage, cinquefoil and fireweed, the national flower of Greenland, making the most of the brief Arctic summer.we went looking for new anchorages along the Liverpool Land coast. We nibbled into Storefjord – long, narrow and deep. Sharp eyes watched for hidden rocks as cloud Another year when the ice broke early
tumbled off the mountains, the forerunner of a screaming katabatic wind that laid us on our beam ends. With all sails furled we motored on, looking for a minor fjord
where there was the possibility of shelter. A line from the log sums it up: ‘Huge peaks with hanging glaciers and immense emptiness, all very intimidating.’ I picked a
spot in the lee of an old moraine, which had dumped piles of rocks and gravel into the fjord forming a barrier between the boat and major ice concentrations up ahead.
down, dinner on the table and a few sips from our fast diminishing bonded stores, we relaxed – though not for long. Without Lady Luck was with us. With the anchor
warning there was the sound like a train roaring towards us. Ice, graunching and crashing, swept past us at around three knots, with much more to come. To my
Moraine rubble and a mountain stream pushed the ice away from the fjord on a falling tideSeafra as it left amazement, what had appeared as fast ice had chosen this moment to detach itself from the head of the fjord and withMosquito bites on David McKee’s arm. They turned our anchorage into a nightmareSeafra at anchor in Jyttes Havn. The Stauning Alps make the perfect backdrop